


lenience

by milkywayes



Series: spirit and string [2]
Category: The Legend of Zelda & Related Fandoms, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
Genre: Angst and Romance, Eventual Fluff, F/M, Getting Link to talk is a Process, Hero of Hyrule - Freeform, Link remembers nothing AU, Loss, Post-Calamity Ganon, Trauma
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-04-21
Updated: 2020-05-16
Packaged: 2021-03-01 01:40:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 19,559
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23447152
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/milkywayes/pseuds/milkywayes
Summary: Grief was always part of this, she finds. Grief is them down to the bone; it's what they do with it that matters.
Relationships: Link/Zelda (Legend of Zelda)
Series: spirit and string [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1686754
Comments: 48
Kudos: 81





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> When I wrote extant, I didn't think I'd be writing a sequel. I thought I'd just be getting it out of my system but joke's on me for leaving the ending so open because then I couldn't stop thinking about how Zelda would deal with this version of Link. And here we are! I know this sort of post-game fic exists everywhere already but I can't get enough of them and each one I've read ended up being markedly different anyway.
> 
> This picks up right where extant left off and I recommend reading that first. Don't worry, it's short. You don't necessarily have to but I don't think it would be quite the same if you don't. Still, the gist is this: Link doesn't recover any memories of a hundred years ago but in turn is all the more aware of the spirit of the hero. Going into this, I was excited to see how Zelda's different POV and experiences would change the style of the prose. I wanted her voice to be distinct but for the story to still fit in well with the tone that extant set. In the end it's much more 'in the moment'.
> 
> It'll probably be short and (bitter-)sweet, three chapters or so. Most is already written but I'm not on a set schedule here.
> 
> I hope you'll enjoy! Again, I'd love to hear from you. Stay safe and healthy out there!

_“Zelda, I knew you even when I didn’t, and if you’ll let me, I’ll know you yet again.”_

_______

Day breaks on Hyrule the very same way that it has every day for a hundred years. If she thought there would be something special about this morning above all others, something recognizably different in the quality of the light or of the shadows it throws, then she was wrong. The difference lies not in the morning. It’s in her, really: in the way everything is immediate, all of a sudden. The high notes of bird song reach her with nary a delay, the damp wind slaps her skirts around her legs with unforeseen abandon, and he—well, he is the most immediate thing of them all.

Some part of her is aware that he might have just made some grand statement, yet all she manages to parse from his declaration is that it’s the most convoluted “no” she’s ever heard. And that’s saying a _lot_.

Reddened light leaks over the great silhouette of Death Mountain to the north-east and colors in his features with tentative warmth, at odds with the coldness that slowly but surely spreads through her insides.

That, too, is immediate.

His hair has grown longer, falling out of his ponytail in strands and wisps to rest like fallen leaves upon his shoulders. The color still reminds her of fields of Tabantha wheat the day before harvest. His cheeks, though slashed bloody and haggard, are still at home in his face. She’s seen him look worse than this. Seen him in the throes of death. All she can think is that he has absorbed all of her kingdom’s wilds into him, from lush forests to scraggly stone to rolling meadows, in storm and in ice and in summer’s heat, and that he has _forgotten_ her. Just as the land has. Just as her people have.

And he can’t even tell her outright.

There are not twenty paces between them and yet the idea of crossing them like she wanted to, dreamed of for years and years and _years_ —coming home to something, someone, finally; handing over her burden for someone else to hold, to hold _her_ , even if just for a second—

It stutters in her chest. Draws a single gasping breath, shrivels, sours.

A question makes it just past her lips before it breaks off. It scatters to the four winds and so does all of her determination.

“Oh,” she says instead.

All this while she has prided herself on her eloquence and wit, and _that’s_ the thing she says to him. A non-word. Not even a thought. The sound of a dagger pushing into her chest, if anything.

She reels, silent as the castle at her back and somehow, just as empty. So this is what the Calamity’s reduced her to. She never considered herself a casualty—maybe she should have, if this is what’s left.

Her body catches up with her, then. Her legs remember that they haven’t stood on their own in a century, her skin remembers how to chill, her heart how to plummet out of her ribcage.

He’s not quite quick enough to catch her.

A hundred years ago, he would have pulled her into him before she could have as much as brushed with the ground. It’s an uncharitable thought, but it’s there nonetheless, at the forefront of her mind even as the dull pain shoots up her backside and her legs twist beneath her.

Then she sees the falter in his step, the pallor of his skin that has him looking nearly see-through under all that red and dirt.

She prods sharply at her own pain to atone for not accounting for his—an old flaw, by now, isn’t it?

He reaches her but doesn’t reach _for_ her. Instead, his hands hover disappointingly between them, as if they, like her, are too aware of the distance that separates them now. He lowers himself to keep level with her eyes. It is only when she forces herself to meet his gaze that he completes the movement. His hands are dry and colder than they should be on her bare shoulders—that thrice-damned dress, when will she be rid of it?—and something odd, hot and wet takes that as its cue to work its way up her throat.

She bites it _down_.

The tips of his fingers curl just enough to gently dent her skin. She knows what he’s asking— _Are you all right?_ —because his is a language that she once learned purposefully, methodically, after she realized that it existed. It’s hard to tell if it still does: she has no data to go on, and this might be the only extant thing about him there for her to find. She averts her eyes to the grass below her.

“When you…” The words come out thin and reedy. She clears her throat, starts over. “When you called me by my name instead of my title, I was so sure that meant that you remembered.”

She feels him shift, favoring one knee over the other. Her eyes follow the movement and spot a red wetness staining the coarse tan of his trousers, growing larger as she watches. Her chest seizes in a wave of panic that she should’ve left behind her a century ago. It spills right out of her mouth: “You’re _hurt!_ Link! Of course you are, and I made you rush over to me for no reason—oh, please, forgive my thoughtlessness!”

He shrugs. Still doesn’t speak. His mouth is small and tight.

He lifts himself out of his crouch, slowly and deliberately, then offers her a hand.

She stares. Her pulse is in her ears.

Behind her, the light shifts from red to burnt orange to gold.

He holds it still. Doesn’t jut it out at her, doesn’t withdraw, like he’s fallen right out of time the way she had and it’s up to her now to pull him back into the flow of it. She steels herself. Lays her palm against his. Tries her hardest to leave her grief and disappointment in a heap in the grass below as he pulls her to her feet.

But it seems she may have used up all her victories for the decade to come.

*

She doesn’t return to the castle, lets him take her in the opposite direction. Its shadow falls upon the lands, long and sharp, the impressions of spires spearing groves and burrows and hills to remind them of the death it houses. Nothing lives in it now that she is gone; nothing will for a while. Only ghosts dwell there between ruined tapestries and toppled walls and she knows that they make for very bad company. She used to listen to the thud-thud-thudding of the hearts of birds unfortunate enough to be swept into the Calamity’s mist from her residence in the Sanctum; their pulse would race, then slow, then stop. The sound of their small bodies splitting on the roofs and ramparts punctuated her thoughts for decades.

_Residence_. She clenches her teeth. It’s been hours and already she is softening her past up for consumption.

She wants to hold on to the hurt and grit of it just out of principle, lest somewhere down the line someone could claim she had it _easy_ , that she only _waited_ , a frail maiden in the clutches of a beast.

It sounds so laughable now. To think she was a hostage when the bars that caged it were wrought from her own flesh and nothing else. It sat in her ribcage for a hundred years, heavy and painful as a tumor a thousand times the size of her heart, squishing all that was hers into the hard ridge of her sternum until she felt fit to burst.

When she breathes too deeply now, too hungry for air that isn’t stale, she feels the place that it lived in her like a bruise. A furtive peek down her neckline doesn’t reveal the angry purple that she expects there. She wonders how many days the blood takes to reach the surface of her skin—how many she has left until the evidence of her grotesque deed becomes undeniable.

She knows well enough what is in her future now.

At least, she thinks, there is a future.

At least he woke up.

At least he lived.

Everything else—well—she might have been a little too proficient at holding on to hope.

She’s always too proficient at the things that haunt her in the end.

*

Hyrule spread out like a weed while she wasn’t looking. What used to be a mile or two at most is now a day’s walk on aching feet over rubble-strewn dirt roads and half-collapsed bridges, the ground stretching itself thin until new meadows spring up in the cracks that run through it. The first time they came across a ruin, she suffered the sight like she’d suffer a blow. It knocked the wind out of her to see the innards and skeletons of people’s lives— _her people’s_ lives—left out for the elements to wear down into next to nothing.

“To bury a house like one would a body,” she says around the lump in her throat. Her voice is slow and low enough to be drowned out by evening’s cricket song, and she makes no effort to raise it over the din. “Would that honor those who died within it or would it just scorn the dead? I wonder. They never saw a funeral themselves… Now, there’s nothing left.”

Nothing except the house, which lived only as long as it housed life and stands dead and cold in its absence. How long until something would live in it again? The birds, the bugs—are they enough? But how could they be?

Movement. She jumps out of her skin but it’s just _him_ , stepping up next to her as if the three paces behind were never a rule that he followed to the letter and to his death. On the cushion of grass, he moves without sound, a specter on the prowl. She knows better than to check if his feet touch the ground, though only just.

He doesn’t glance at her, doesn’t share his thoughts. It should comfort her, this apparent universality, this immutable trait of his that holds up in the face of amnesia and tragedy. And yet, when she returns her attention to the husk of a home before her, she sees him reflected back to her in the cracked stone and missing roof, instead.

The shape of him recognizable still and yet the insides...

Reclaimed by nature. Wood rot, grass and lichen to take the place of what once had a home there.

At her sides, her hands curl into fists.

*

Sparks fly bright into the night air as he whets the sharpened edge of a stone against the blade of one of his swords, nondescript steel he procured from somewhere she couldn’t see, that doesn’t gleam blue where it catches the light. Its plain leather hilt sits in his hand like he can barely tolerate its touch.

The Sword that Seals the Darkness— _sealed_ the darkness, or maybe that was her—rests sheathed against his knee and his leg is tilted in such a way that has her think he’s leaning into it rather than the other way around, like he’s demonstrating his true allegiance with his posture or finding comfort in the presence of a lover.

The thought makes her uneasy. There’s something there that wasn’t before, an angle followed all the way in a direction that she can’t pinpoint.

Sparks nestle into the wood at his feet and from it blazes warmth.

In her time knowing him, she has seen him make plenty of fires, and though she never paid apt attention to the process she knows in her bones now that this is not quite it. It’s like watching a stranger do it, someone whose movements of habit and center of balance she’s unfamiliar with, though the result is the same and it chases the chill off her bare arms and legs just fine, like it’s supposed to.

But she doesn’t have to like it.

She doesn’t.

A thankless part of her wishes he would ask so she could tell him so.

When the three bites of the meal he cooked her—it tasted good but that’s the problem, there was so much taste to it that it burnt the roof of her mouth and made the workings of her throat slow and reluctant—grow to weigh tons in her stomach, she gathers the stained white of her skirts and wraps them tight around herself to cover her arms. She turns onto her side in the wet grass, face to the fire, ear to the earth. She imagines the workings of worms and shrew moles beneath. Across from her, he finishes his third helping, and she is glad for the mellow birch wood smoke that chases away the smell of the meal. Viewed through the dancing flame, his body flickers in and out of existence. She falls asleep to the sight.

Her first night’s sleep in a century is over before she knows to enjoy it at all, and the mundanity of that is something she doesn’t know what to do with. She wakes with a mouthful of her own hair, salty and earthen and unexpected. The fire is embers, the morning hour golden, and her legs and arms are tied up in her dress and in her long tresses in a way that is painful and ridiculous enough that she whines and then laughs and laughs as she extricates herself.

The sound bursts out of her, breathless and clumsy, less joy than perhaps mania, than perhaps grief, though the exertion leaves her with a warmth that might deserve to be called joy just the same. It persists until she looks over at his chosen spot and doesn’t find him there. Then, it lodges itself sideways in her throat.

It takes her a minute to choke down the panic. Exactly as long as it takes her to turn around and around on the spot until the morning sun is thrown back at her from a nearby tree, glinting off the metal buckle of a boot that dangles between its branches. Through the leaves, she spies him curled up in the crown, body wedged into the fork of the trunk, cheek to the bark and eyelids closed to the world.

His chest rises and falls.

She watches for a while as her breathing slows.

*

“The more I think on it,” she confesses, crouched over the bank of a shallow turn of the River Hylia, hands working methodically to rid the dress of its mud and blood and grass stains, “the less I seem to be able to make sense of what you meant.”

He sends her a slow look from underneath his fringe and says nothing.

In the corner of her vision, the Applean Forest stands green and vibrant, though she has taken care not to tilt her head too much for it to come into focus. The trousers he has lended her pinch at her hips when she turns her body towards him and away from it. To face one pain is to leave behind another.

“You know, with what you said.”

He nods. His eyes are clear blue the way the water isn’t but should be. They rest on her for longer than what would’ve been appropriate back when he was her appointed knight and she his sovereign and at their backs lay a kingdom.

She goes hot with the thought of it, then cold when the present catches up with her.

He looks away, returns his attention to scrubbing. Pink from the friction, his fingers are long and strong and able, and she considers how wise it would be of her to burst into tears now instead of later, curled up on her own in a bed at Wetland Stable as she has planned it.

Heaving a sigh, silent as she can make it, she returns her attention to the sodden white silks in her grip. She wants to _burn_ the dress, not clean it, but to scorn the Goddesses now would be to invite the Calamity right back to their doorstep. If she loses the little she has left now, she may well lose the fight as well, sealing power notwithstanding.

The ceremonial cuffs, now in a sparkling heap beside her, have left raw indents against the skin of her wrists and forearms. When she moves, they sting. When she doesn’t, they sting.

*

Her people do not know her now but they certainly know him. As much becomes obvious every time a lone traveller on horseback slows to a trot and then to a walk the moment they spot him at her side, every time they enter a stable and the person on shift says, “ _Soft_ bed, then?” before catching sight of her walking in behind him and adding, “My, my, or two?”

Word travels slowly in this new version of Hyrule, empty swathes of land waiting days and weeks to be traversed by something larger than a doe, smarter than a fox. The castle may tower over the Field, empty and free of Malice at last, though all the towns that once thrived at its foothills now lie level with the ground.

Part of her is glad. Only those on the lookout for a princess will be likely to find her, unadorned and travel-roughened as she is.

_He_ is another matter entirely.

Eyes trail him as he moves, getting caught on the gleaming iris pommel of the Sword sticking out from beyond his shoulder the way the hems of trousers get caught on brambles. His name spreads through every stable as if carried onwards by the very draft that flaps and thrums against the fabric of the tent.

Never once does he lift his head when it is uttered near them.

*

It takes her a while to build up the courage to ask again and to make the question a direct one. She knows that if she leaves him the tiniest opening, he will slip right through it, quick and slick like a sparrow in the thicket, and she will never get the answer she seeks.

And she is _very_ particular about answers and the obtainment of them.

“So,” she says, straightening up from her crouch at the fire pit. Freshly braided, her hair hangs heavily over one shoulder. Every movement tugs at her scalp, a small price to pay to keep it out of her face, for now. “Whatever _did_ you mean with what you said?”

The silence that greets her is as aggravating as it is expected; he hasn’t spoken since that first morning—pointing when he needed to and little more than that—which is what makes her question anything but ambiguous. His hands are tangled in the mane of his steed, a spirited bay mare that goes by _Nutcake_ , of all names, at least according to the owner of Riverside Stable. The horse whickers, turns her muzzle into his forearm in what is clearly affection.

She is halfway through an internal debate about whether prompting him a second time would yield her any sort of favorable result when he clears his throat. It’s a rough sound, like there’s sand between his vocal cords, like it _hurts_ , and she feels herself go very still.

“I meant it exactly the way I said it.” His voice is soft and if it weren’t, she thinks it might creak. He glances at her, squints the way she sometimes catches him squinting at the sky, then returns his gaze to his horse. After a moment of what looks to be careful deliberation, he adds, “Zelda.”

She frowns at him. He said her name like there’s something she’s missing, but of course, he is less than forthcoming about whatever it might be. Stubborn rapscallion, she thinks, says, “Well, you’ll have to forgive me if I’m not satisfied with that.”

He threads his fingers out of the silky mane and turns to face her fully. Thin red lines arch up his jaw, less dramatic now that the blood has been washed off. They fail to bring much if any ruggedness to his features. In truth, with most of the kinks and stains worked out of his hair, he is closer in appearance to the prim royal guard he once was than he has any right to be. She is well aware that he’s a wild thing now, underneath that bone structure and the largeness of his eyes.

“You are,” he says. She blinks at him, surprised to find his gaze sharp as a fox’s. She can do nothing but stare as his lips twitch upwards before he clarifies: “Forgiven, that is.”

Her face runs hot. Her foot wants to stomp as badly as it ever has; it’s only training and many a remembered reprimand that keeps it in its place. “ _You_ —!”

“Easy. She’ll spook.” He pats the horse’s neck but the glint in his eye is mischief and nothing else. Nutcake looks as ready to bare her belly to him as she’s ever seen a horse look. “You know she can hear you, and I’d prefer for her to like you.”

Quick thinking and the speedy descent of her teeth into her tongue barely stop a reply from tumbling out: that _she’d_ much prefer to like _him_ but that she’s not sure, right now, that she does.


	2. Chapter 2

In idle moments, he touches his fingers to the hilt of the Sword, splaying against the criss-cross of green cloth, and she discovers an old jealousy within herself whenever she watches. She calls for the golden heat that replaced the blood in her veins for so long and finds only a lukewarm glow buried deep beneath tissue, unresponsive to her own touch.

The things she’d _do_ to find a friend in her destiny. A friend at all.

By the time they reach the underbelly of Hyrule Field, news has finally caught up with them, carried on the backs of merchants and drifters.

 _The castle_ , they say, again and again, in wonder, in disbelief. _Have you seen the castle?_

“Sure I’ve seen the castle,” says a man in rough but tailored clothes as his campfire casts his corpulent outline onto the inner mountainside of one of the Dueling Peaks. “Seen plenty of it in my lifetime. Well, from a distance.” He laughs. “That’s how I got to be this age.”

He’s middle aged, not ancient, and the implication does something to her chest that feels a lot like guilt.

She pushes her weight down onto the rock she’s sitting on to keep from fidgeting, from catching anyone’s eye. Next to her, Link is halfway through re-bandaging his thigh. His movements neither still nor slow.

The man’s attention turns to them anyway. “You kids just came thataway. D’you see anything? Marga here’s about to wet her britches over it. Like that time she had too much ale and imagined a dragon in Tanagar.”

If Marga is offended, she keeps it to herself. “In a day, old man, you’ll see what I mean. And before that you’ll hear it from others. Right?”

She looks Link square in the face.

He’s good at hiding his discomfort, she thinks, but it’s still right there in the tight line of his shoulders bent inward. His hand ties the knot on the bandage and immediately, it gravitates towards the Sword, half-hidden behind his back.

An unexpected feeling takes her and she finds herself leaning forward into Marga’s view to draw her eye away from him. The woman blinks at her like she didn’t realize she’s been sitting there all along.

“Yes! I mean, that’s right.” She aims for excitement and falls short of it by a good, clumsy mile. The words feel large and oblong on her tongue, so much less clipped than everyone else’s; the knowledge prickles at the back of her neck like a gnat. “We, too, have seen it. The castle.”

Marga’s eyebrow jumps upwards but then she turns back to gloat at the man anyway. It’s a relief: she thinks she might have had to wade out into the river and let the current take her, had she stared at her for any longer than that.

Necluda opens up before them and here, the castle is a whisper on the wind, whistling sharply into her ears every time they pass by another person, every time they walk past someone’s campsite. _Have you seen it? I thought it was a trick of the light. I thought I’d hit my head. Someone on their way from Eldin said the sun just swallowed it whole one morning and that was that._

“Look around,” says a woman at the southern end of Big Twin Bridge, her face all angles, as the mountains trail giant shadows across Squabble River and the lands on either side of it. “Can _you_ see the castle from here? No, I haven’t seen it. What a question. I can’t even see half the night sky with the Peaks all in the way. I am not clambering up there just to stare at the wretched thing.”

The merchant shrugs. “Then you heard it from me.” The odors that emanate from his pack are rank iron at its worst, or maybe she just hasn’t known the smell of meat in a long, long time.

“Heard _what_?”

His face breaks out into a grin filled with misaligned teeth. “It’s gone. Don’t know how or when or why, but it is.”

“The castle is gone?”

His grin slips, then recovers. “Not the _castle_. The evil in it! Remember, you heard it from Mezer!”

*

The climate grows cooler and wetter the further they stray from the Field, and she recalls that this was also true before. It’s just that before, it never reminded her of the Swamp and Plain that sit just a half day’s ride to the East, littered with relics of an age long past. Their unseen presence stands like a hinox in her awareness now, radiating with the almost-loss that never quite stopped tugging at her. That’s tugging at her _right now_ , despite of who is next to her, or perhaps all the more because of it.

It’s as much of a relic as the marble pillars are. It juts out of her like they jut out of the swamp: ivory, a broken tooth.

“Never seen you travel with company,” says a young stablehand the morning after they pass through the Dueling Peaks. “Heard that the Calamity’s gone and made the most of it, did you?”

They’re sitting by the outdoor cooking pot, crates and apples surrounding them, fish and cream heady in the air already.

Link completes three stirs with his wooden ladle before he looks up at the young woman. Ruddy-cheeked and brunette, she is the image of flushed health among the otherwise gaunt stragglers moving between the road and the tent.

Finally, he shakes his head.

The girl rolls her eyes, then looks over at her, gaze moving from her face down to the tips of her sandals and back up. “Hullo lassie. You’re wearing his clothes.”

Royal etiquette hasn’t prepared her for _this_ , she laments. Then again, _what_ did it prepare her for? Nothing of import. Nothing that would hold up after a hundred years of ruin and endurance and solitude.

She straightens her shoulders and crosses her ankles. “And you know every piece of Link’s wardrobe, I take it? How come?”

The girl barks out a laugh, turns back to him. This time, he keeps his eyes on his simmering pot full of stew. “She’s feistier than she looks. Expected her to blush all pretty-daisy-like, I did. That accent though—where’d you pick her up, Hebra? _Snowfield_?”

Worse, she thinks. But she won’t tell her and neither does he.

*

A steady breeze blows onward through the canyon, passing through the arrow-pierced gates and into Kakariko. When bumped into each other, the wooden charms clink and chime above her head, and it’s that sound that draws her eye. Her next breath goes in the wrong way.

Their red lacquer, shiny despite years in the sun and the rain, glints like the fresh blood of a mortal wound.

Unbidden, it returns to her: red welling up between her fingers as she pressed a desperate, still-glowing hand to his torso; too many wounds to account for; the wet, the heat and the slick of it—the feeling of life itself leaking against her palm—following her all the way through the Lost Woods, through the blazing townships and towards the castle.

The hand she raised against the Calamity was crusted copper with it.

She comes out on the other side of the gates with her teeth clenched and her veins burning. Her heart, too, is remembering: clinging to its frantic rhythm even as it sinks. It takes her six stiff steps down the slope that brings Kakariko into view before she realizes he isn’t following.

She turns just enough to see the shape of him in the corner of her vision. He haunts her even as his heart beats. The effort it takes to pry her jaws apart nearly undoes all the rest she got in the soft bed that he paid for. “Link?”

He doesn’t jerk back into motion as she expects him to. She turns to face him completely, though exasperation dies on her tongue when she takes him in. Still as a statue, he stands with his hand on the reins of his mare and his eyes wide, clear, and fixed on her.

A swallow bobs visibly in his throat.

Giving up on decorum and wrapping her arms around herself, she frowns, dreads, then forces herself to ask. “What’s wrong?”

He shifts on his feet, shoulders moving back and then slumping again as if his own body denied him the confidence he sought. Then, as has become a habit, he says the worst thing he could possibly say to her.

“I’m sorry for your loss,” he murmurs.

She doesn’t know what she expected, she just knows it wasn’t that. “My—my _what_?”

He nods his chin upwards. The breeze howls again, only it’s a full-blown gust now, rattling through the charms and lifting his hair to sway airborne around him for the fraction of a very, very long second. In storm and in ice and in summer’s heat, she thinks dully. Her mind is screaming at her to ask him _how_ , how could he _know_ , but that’s not the conversation she wants to have.

She says, “He’s not dead. I made sure of that.”

He inclines his head in a reserved sort of acknowledgment. It does less to mollify her than to make her feel like she got slapped in the face.

“You disagree?”

Eyes narrowing, he angles himself away from her, a hand coming up to brush down the length of Nutcake’s strong neck. She watches his fingers, the way they barely touch, a tenderness there that belies the callouses and raised scars that would mark them as the hands of a killer.

He was always more than that, and he is more now.

She just doesn’t know what. She doesn’t know who.

She sighs. “Do you even know?”

His gaze is back on her in an instant.

Drawing herself up to stand taller, though that is hardly necessary considering his build, she drops her arms back to her sides and just _says_ it. “Do you know who you are? Because I don’t. I don’t and—and you’re standing here saying things like ‘Sorry for your loss’, like you’re doing me a kindness. It’s _quite_ the opposite, I’ll have you know. And I…”

Her hands are shaking, she realizes. Judging by the way his eyebrows are pulling together, so does he. Does he think her weak? Foolish, to be prattling on about her feelings like this—to a _stranger_?

The thought nearly undoes her. She turns back around, eyes on the path into the village.

Maybe if she stops looking at him, he’ll stop looking at her.

She wills herself to start moving again, enters Kakariko the way she would step off a cliff. Buildings rise around her as if out of memory, their thatch roofs well cared for and their wood planks well scrubbed, ensconced from the rest of the world by the high rise of Levia’s karst peaks. And yet the streets are emptier than she’s ever seen them. On each and every window, the brown parchment blinds are drawn.

Behind her, Nutcake’s hooves click softly against gravel.

She knows he is still there, still following—his presence a tingle down her spine, half warning and half something else—though there are no sounds to tie the sensation to, no steps or exhales or fabric rustle, like he’s putting real effort into being almost-not-there, as not-alive as he can make himself. It certainly drives his point home. She grinds her jaws into each other.

Further down the sloping path, a woman leans against a wooden sign. Clad in the traditional garb of the Sheikah and with her pale hair in a knot, she could have been an apparition from the past, if it weren’t for the unease with which she scuffs the separated toe of her boot against the ground, again and again, like she’d rather be anywhere else. They draw closer and she turns her head in their direction, long ears twitching.

“By Hylia, finally, a customer!” she cries, arm swinging out to point at the house behind her, though she is still obscuring most of the sign with her body. “Don’t be shy, Miss, I can tell you need a new…” But she stops there. Her gaze jumps away from her face to stare at what’s behind her instead. The arm falls back to her side. Lamely, she finishes, “… A new wardrobe.”

She stops walking and behind her, Nutcake’s steps taper off. Pressing down hard on the lump of emotions obstructing her throat, she manages to ask, “Are you quite all right?”

The Sheikah woman’s eyes return to her. They widen. “Oh.”

And with that, she turns on the spot and scrambles up the short set of steps to the house, footfalls sounding loudly through the quiet village. Halfway there, she freezes again, turns stiffly back around to affect a bow, then flies up the rest of the steps. The door falls shut behind her with a thunderclap.

The lump returns. This isn’t what she expected, again, and she supposes there is a lesson in there somewhere, though if there is one thing she has had enough of in this life, then it is _lessons_.

She gets no opportunity to dwell on this, however, when, with a sharp _click_ , the parchment blinds on the door snap upwards to reveal a face pressed to the glass. Another woman. The eyes she regards her with are the size of dinner plates. One by one and down the length of the street, the sound repeats itself.

“Is it the Yiga?” The muffled question is carried over by the breeze. “In broad _daylight_?”

The door to the shop reopens just enough for the answer to be heard. “No, Steen! Look, will you?“

Maybe Steen does or maybe he doesn’t but either way, there is no reply.

Two silver heads peek out of two separate doorways to stare down the road, locking on to them and causing her ears to burn hot against the sides of her head when they, too, scramble back inside their homes, though they leave their doors wide open. Children’s excitable cheers pierce through the air before they are shushed, only to sound again, marginally more quiet.

“Like from the goodnight story? Can I see, can I see?” is the high-pitched cry that finally rocks her back into motion, shoulders around her ears as she stalks down the path, eyes on her dirtied feet in her worn sandals that look ridiculous, paired with the long legs of his trousers.

The awareness of the image she must present doesn’t help in the slightest and neither does the fact that he trails her to the steps leading up to the Elder’s house and no further. The men standing guard drop to their knees at the sight of her—or not of _her_ but of her in the company of him, and at what that means—faces paling only to come aflush with color the next moment, though their eyes stay glued to his retreating back.

In the corner of her vision, Nutcake’s large shadow moves as she is led away in the direction of the inn and its stable, which she is well aware is also the direction of the village’s westernmost exit.

She doesn’t turn. Knows better than to watch him leave. Fights herself with every step she takes up to the house and its double doors, which open to reveal a harried-looking young woman, more traditional even than the woman at the shop, who squeals when she lays eyes on her and promptly disappears back inside.

When she pushes the doors back open, all the air around her and inside her is sucked into the chamber. It draws at her clothes, the braid, the blood in her cheeks. When her eyes land on the tiny figure balanced on the dais, so alien and yet familiar, she finds she feels much like a specter herself.

A voice sounds, creaky and wizened and larger than life. “To see you once again, Princess… That boy, I admit I did not think he had it in him.”

*

Three days and nights pass over Kakariko in which she does not see even a hint of him. No one goes out to look for him, to thank him for his accomplishment, his sacrifice, though they have no qualms thanking her.

Impa is all wrinkle, half smiles and half frowns; white-haired villagers either bustle around her or fall back to their knees; children run up only to be pulled back by their parents before they can reach. She wants them to come to her, she realizes, to latch on to her with grubby hands and bubbling laughter—she wants to be touched, though no one does, not even once.

She finds herself watching Impa’s hands, the way they stay folded resolutely in her lap, the way the lamplight shines through to the blue veins beneath. A hundred years to turn skin to paper, voice to rasp.

She pinches the skin stretched over the backs of her own hands and watches it spring back into shape like the taut string on one of his bows. Her voice flows from her as if buttered by pumpkin stew and rice wine. Her chest retains its pallor and doesn’t go plum with the ache it still houses. She remembers every day, every year, and yet has nothing to show for it.

They call her Princess as if that still means something to anyone but them. They offer her celebrations, proclamations, dusty finery pulled from trunks hidden away under floorboards—she refuses what she can, postpones the rest for later, later, when she has regained her strength.

On the first day, she sits and sits until her legs fall asleep and her ears start to ring. She finds out she is a better listener than she ever used to be: time has chipped away at her urgency, her drive. She voices her doubt, though only as much as she can cradle in her palm, fist her fingers around and press into small pieces she can pepper in here and there where it won’t get her fussed over or wagged at.

She is not always successful.

“I’m so far removed,” she says at one point when she is tired, her mouth is dry and her eyes won’t stop burning, “from everything that lives in the here and now. It’s like I feel closer to… to the bedrock and the ancients and cursed _bird carcasses_ than I do to any Hylian I meet on the road. If I close my eyes for long enough, I’m back in the castle, with no one coming for me.” She swallows. “With no one listening.”

Impa tips her ceremonial hat upwards to fix her with a look that could almost be amusement. “My dear, how is that any different from how you felt when we were both young? Wasn’t your nose always tucked away in books and old machinery even then? Always lamenting about your ankle chained to stone… You could have led your people then, if necessary, though you were spared that particular hardship. Time, in the end, has been kind to you.”

She doesn’t think it has. She doesn’t think it has been kind to anyone, or that kindness is even something it’s capable of. Not from what she’s seen.

That thought, she keeps to herself.

When the sun has dipped past the surrounding mountains and they both sit in shadow, the lines around Impa’s eyes and mouth deepen. She takes one long sip from her tea cup before she speaks. “Your strength impresses me,” she says. “To endure what you have and then to cross through the remains of your country with your head still held high… to meet your knight again only to find out about all that he is not… I wish I could have spared you.”

He’s not her knight, she thinks, even as her ire rises because he is not _less_ , because he is not _nothing_ , even if that is all that she knows. The hypocrisy isn’t lost on her: when she thinks these thoughts in the privacy of her own head, they don’t sound nearly as unjust as when Impa speaks them into the air. The pain of that loss is hers and hers alone and yes, she wishes she had spared her, too, so that she wouldn’t have to want so desperately to grab him by the front of his tunic and say to his face: _I’m all alone with the weight of this._ Say: _When I sealed the Beast away, I wasn’t prepared to bear it for one minute longer._ Say: _It’s on you that I have to._

On the second day, she is led up the stairs and presented with a mirror hidden in a dark corner of the loft, opposite from where they set up her cot. A tremor has her fingers shake when she pulls off the cloth drape; on its scratched and clouded surface, the light behind her blooms outward around her blonde head.

Paya shuffles off to her right, then seems to catch sight of her own reflection and folds herself over in a bow that would have put even the lowliest courtiers to shame.

“Grandmother asked me to show you this, your H-h—Goddesses, I’m so sorry!—your _Highness_.”

The face that looks back at her has not seen a day past her seventeenth birthday—cheeks soft and round, forehead smooth instead of furrowed—and somehow that thought just adds to the weight that drags her shoulders down, her feet into the floor.

Seventeen feels as distant to her as the memory of her mother.

“It’s Zelda,” she corrects tonelessly for what has to be the tenth time, brings a hand up to where a piece of rough twine ties the end of her braid together. She pulls at it until it gives. Loosens the braid in sections, slowly, up to the back of her neck. Pulls the strands apart, lets them fall down her back and over her shoulders, kept out of her face only by the long arch of her ears.

It frizzes and tangles where it shouldn’t. Flyaways arch up at the crown of her head to burn golden in the glow.

On the sideboard next to her, a carved comb has been laid out next to a vial of yellowy oil. She considers it for less than a second.

Maybe she could be a wild thing, too—

If it weren’t for the white dress still neatly wrapped in a saddle bag, the nervous flutter of her heart, or the expectation barely hidden in Impa’s eyes upon her, that is.

That night, she dreams of Malice and purple fumes and the way they stick to her airways when she blows them out of her nostrils like a dragon, except she’s bloated and unholy, guardian of nothing but the Demon King’s sick spirit. Naydra sends her away from her mountain, and in the dream she is a woman, though her teeth are pinpricks and her tongue is forked. _What a shame_ , she says and the language that she speaks isn’t Hylian at all. _The White Goddess tinged with rust._ She opens her blue reptile mouth and down her throat, all the way down, is nothing but ice. _You can’t blame the boy for running._

On the third day she vibrates where she sits, walks, stands. She ducks out from underneath gazes and looks out every window she comes across until someone catches her and fusses over her again.

One of the guardsmen, Cado, shakes his head at her question, gaze lowered in deference. “No, Princess, I haven’t seen Master Link.” He doesn’t sound worried. Rather, he sounds like this is just how it is, and what did she expect?

She requests to take her supper in privacy, wolfs her portion down fast enough to turn her stomach. When she is done, she sneaks out of her room, down the edges of the stairs where the creaky wood has settled, into the heady evening air and into the inn, only to see that every last bed there is empty. At the desk, the clerk is fast asleep. When woken, all that falls out of his mouth is _sorry_ and _no, no, not for a long time_.

She informs the man that he has no concept of what _a long time_ is and that if fortune favors him at all, he never will.

*

She finds Nutcake laden with most of his things, grazing at the top of Sahasra Slope in the dawn. A mirror of the sky, the Wetlands lie far below. She can’t make out the ruins of Goponga Village but she knows they are there all the same—a shrine sits, brilliantly blue, on a small island not far off from where they would be. She waits for the investigative desire to hit her, to make her fingers itch for her field journal and for the slate that he still carries, and waits in vain. In the absence of fuel, the fire in her feeds on itself. Its smoke tastes acrid on her tongue.

She shudders, wraps the ivory Sheikah gown tighter around herself. A cucco in Kakariko announces the arrival of morning and its call echoes off the mountain walls to reach her. A second call follows, then a third, then a fourth.

It takes a while for the racket to die down. Once it does, she raises her own voice to the wind.

“I thought you might have left.”

Nutcake angles an ear in her direction and that is about the only thing that happens.

“I spoke with Impa.”

In the distance, a heron beats its wings before launching into flight. Nutcake chews.

“About lots of things,” she plows on anyway. “And she ended up telling me what you told her—and that you _left_ and then didn’t return. She… feared that you never would. But you did your part. All that, _despite_ , and… seeing that you’re still here…”

The wind changes direction, whips her hair around her face. She takes a moment to wrestle it out of her eyes, still unwilling to make use of the twine again, and ends up holding it in a twist away from her face. So much for dignity, she thinks, and hopes he isn’t looking.

Hopes he isn’t _listening_ , in truth, though she has more experience in beating down her own selfishness than anyone else alive.

Except for maybe him.

“Even if you hadn’t performed your duty so… admirably, you _can’t_ be bound by an oath you don’t even remember. The old protocol would have dictated that I declare it, so I will: _please_ , consider yourself free.”

Tendrils of grief grasp up at her, latching on to her airways, turning her next exhale into something small and terrified. She listens—grass rustle, wind whistle, nothing more and nothing less—and then gives up, letting go of her fluttering mane and letting it hit her cheeks, sting her eyes. It feels, somehow, appropriate. At her side, her hand flexes.

It’ll always have his blood on it, whether she wants it or not.

From far, far up above her, a voice drifts down. It’s barely louder than her own breathing, but she hears it anyway. She’d hear it from the other side of the country, with ridges and flatlands between them, and that makes no sense, scientifically, and yet she somehow knows it to be true.

“You’re doing it again.”

Chest seizing, she blinks upwards, opens her mouth only for her hair to fly into it. Splutters, then calls, “What do you mean?”

A strange sound, like air hitting a ship sail.

She stumbles several steps backwards when she realizes what she’s seeing, his legs dangling loosely as he twirls in the sky like a bird—that _glider_ , she never saw him use it, and she is glad about that because now she knows that it is terrifying.

He lands with practiced grace not two steps away from his mare, who continues her chewing undeterred. The glider folds and is quickly tied to Nutcake’s saddle.

There’s color high in his cheeks. He’s windswept in every sense of the word and looks all the more alive because of it. The sight renders her mind utterly blank.

“Projecting,” he says finally.

Again, she paws at her hair. “What?”

She makes a dreadful princess. That, she’s known for a while.

He just gazes at her. His face is as much of a mask as it always has been and she knows not what lies behind it. Wood rot, grass and lichen. Not _like_ her, not hers, not anyone’s. At most, she thinks, he is Farore’s.

 _She_ is not Farore. She is barely even Hylia, let alone Nayru.

He raises a hand and gestures towards her. “Look.”

She does: she looks at his hand.

In the silence that stretches between them, another cucco raises its voice in a delayed caw.

He sighs dramatically then, his whole body heaving with it, and all she can think is that she’s never seen him emote like that. When he strides over to her, her limbs stay frozen. His movements become more cautious the closer he gets, she can tell as much, though all other speculation grinds to a halt when he stops within touching distance.

He reaches out for her hand. _Takes_ it, lifts it up between them and turns the back of it to the slanting sunlight. The last time he touched her he was cold; now he is warm. Tears spring up into her eyes. Hurriedly, she fights them off, and is distracted enough by the struggle to almost miss what he is trying to show her: the shine, barely even there, that dances over her knuckles and along the long bones towards her wrist.

Her eyebrows hit her hairline.

“I don’t know why it’s doing that,” she admits. Her voice comes out steady and she knows to count that as a win.

There’s a glint in his eyes: the light refracts in them, turns them to cut sapphire instead of mere blue, something forged by age and pressure and just the right touch at the right time. It suits him.

He squints not at the holy light but at her.

“You did it before,” he says slowly, “at the gates. Projecting your loss for me. I’m _still_ sorry.”

Thickly, she swallows. A moment passes before she can make herself speak through the sudden churning of her insides, the roar of her pulse. “That was never my intention. I wouldn’t wish for you to… to feel that.”

Oh, but she’s a liar, isn’t she?

He shrugs, the red dawn behind him, and in the same movement, he lets go of her hand. It falls limply back to her side. She doesn’t check to see if it’s still glowing with Hylia’s light; there’s a weight on her now that bars her from it.

“I meant it, before,” she says eventually, and the words are ash in her mouth. She owes it to him to say them anyway; she’ll have time to choke on them later. “I want you to know that you’re free to go and have been this whole time. I know that the land calls your name. I’ve heard it, too.”

Her voice echoes weakly off the surrounding stone. He stands still as if waiting for the last of it to fade before he reacts. Part of her suspects he will just up and leave, take his horse and trot off into the wilds without a backward glance, never to be seen again. It’s what he deserves if he wants it. A life in the fresh air, away from following eyes and frowning mouths. A mirage left on her mind and nothing else at all.

His blood is the rust stuck between her fingers. She’d run from that too, if she were him—

“It’s not the _land_ ,” he says instead, looking chagrined.

A heartbeat, rogue in her chest.

 _Then stay,_ she thinks loudly but doesn’t say, and he blinks at her, inclines his head as if to say, _of course_.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Remember when I said this would be three chapters or so? “Or so” won.
> 
> Also, I split this one in two so you can get an update sooner since I'll have my final exam before graduation next week.

The next day announces itself with a canon of cucco voices, and when she cracks her eyes open to Paya’s face and her stumbled-through question of whatever happened to the prayer dress, if she would let Claree mend it, _Grandmother_ says she needs to consider the image she presents to the public, _your Highness_ , she lets her gaze drift to the wooden ceiling beams and thinks that at long last, Link starts to make sense to her.

She rubs a hand over her face. Tries to clear the grit from her eyes, the dread from her heart, manages only one of these and pinches the bridge of her nose between her thumb and forefinger.

Then asks if Claree also deals in travel attire and that if yes, to inquire about a trade deal; she has zero rupees to her name but could pay in pieces of antique gold with some historical significance, at least.

Paya pales but doesn’t argue.

The arguing comes later.

The Sheikah hand her a horse, a royal blue journeying ensemble and a bundle full of rice balls, half of which come stuffed with buttered carrot and the other with steamed pumpkin—much to the dismay of two farmers, which only grows when she refrains from declaring which crop is better suited to her ‘refined palate’, as they put it. She tells them that she hasn’t eaten much of anything in a century and has consequently grown quite bad at tasting, leaves them to their ensuing argument to better inspect the folded stack of clothes. She thinks she can forgive the blue, if only because the trousers are a sensible tan and the seams don’t dig into her thighs at all. Also, it includes boots. The thought of an existence without the horror of sandy toes brightens her mood considerably.

The Sheikah refuse to accept payment and instead offer her their services as safekeepers, their eyes clinging to the unopened saddle bag that holds her ceremonial wear like it might disappear if someone blinks. She knows that safekeeping translates directly to making sure that no one could ever hope to sell or even touch it again. It also means it’ll collect dust in Impa’s attic for the coming aeon and perhaps the one after that, so she lets them have it without a fight.

She bids Impa good-bye with a curtsy to soften the blow at least a little—it’s improper, skirtless as she is, but there’s a meaning there and one has to weigh these factors against each other—to which Impa says, more cheek than gravel, “Do be careful with that Hero of yours, my Princess. He’s just waiting for you to forget. For all our sakes, see to it that you don’t, and then return to us.” Something must have flickered across her face because then Impa frowns at her and adds, with a look that pierces as well as any arrow, “Believe me when I say that the need for your presence has _not_ diminished over these years.”

She’s out the door and down the steps long before she can even begin to sort through that, let alone form a suitable reply.

He waits in the town square on Nutcake’s back, his feet firmly in the stirrups and his face turned up towards the sky. A beam of light breaks through the cloud cover as if to meet him, and she might be the Goddess-blood Princess but she thinks he’s something, too, just then, though the notion brings with it less wonder than unease.

The Sword gleams in its ornate scabbard and she notices that even before she spots his hand curling around the hilt like a vice.

He removes the hand only when she walks up next to him on a gray stallion called Cardam—the closest they had to her late white, she suspects, though she knows better than to voice the thought. His eyes are steady on her, not straying to any of the waving townsfolk there to see them off, not even when Paya, face beet red and gaze flitting back and forth between them, wishes them safe passage.

Neither of them speaks as they pass below the swaying charms and through the bottleneck of the canyon, her head kept low until the last of the red disappears from the corners of her vision, until the chimes stop echoing in her ears.

Water streams down the cliff sides in slender waterfalls, a remnant of last evening’s rains. She knows where he weathered the downpour: up in a sparsely-leaved tree somewhere beyond the village borders, just out of sight of the inn with the many empty beds. Tension leaves his shoulders with every bit of distance they accumulate between themselves and Kakariko.

She finds she cannot blame him.

*

Their horses take them out of the narrow mountain pass in half the time it took them on their way in, for all that it feels twice as long and arduous. She rides with her teeth clenched against the rub of the leather fenders against the insides of her legs, against the crick in her neck that twinges with every roll of Cardam’s body beneath her.

The riding classes she received as a small child—the rules of posture, movement, poise—dangle just out of her reach, a will-o’-the-wisp in the fog that sweeps in towards them once the canyon wall to the left breaks away to the steep plunge into Lake Siela beneath. If she were to try and grasp it, she’d surely fall out of her saddle.

The frigid damp only worsens the chafing, and she is about to swallow her pride and ask Link for an early luncheon when his head snaps up, hand flying off the reins and towards her in a gesture that a hundred years ago meant _slow now_.

Her breath hitches. It’s less out of trepidation than the picture he paints: his gaze fixed ahead and arm thrown out in her direction, like some old part of him has peeled itself out of the murk of her memories and is now manifesting in the hazy midday air, close enough to touch.

She doesn’t try. She stiffens her back, pushes her weight down. Cardam stops his trot.

This, at least, she remembers.

With a quick glance back at her, Link spurs Nutcake into a canter, hooves pelting the ground and sending loose bits of earth flying. The sudden burst of displaced air hits her like a whip. He leaves his hand out— _stay like that; don’t move_ —until he reaches the place where the path takes him around a bend, dropping the arm and most of the alertness that had his back look ramrod straight just before Nutcake leans into the turn and they disappear from sight.

Blankly, she stares after him.

Cardam snorts softly and in the distance, a waterfall rumbles. She strains her ears to no avail; the sound of hooves against ground has faded into nothing.

Grimacing, she rolls her head on her shoulders to loosen the taut muscles there, and that helps for about half a minute until she has to force her shoulders back down from around her ears, where they travelled entirely without her consent. Rolls her head again, then groans. Claps her hand over her mouth—she’s supposed to keep quiet. Or perhaps not. She could have misread his gesture by a landslide: it might have been ‘alert the Sheikah’, might have been ‘watch my back’, might have been ‘I changed my mind, and this is where we part’.

She should have asked. She’s an idiot for not asking. For _assuming_.

Painstakingly, she swings one leg over Cardam’s rump and dismounts, creeps through the wafting fog on tiptoes, and for a moment she feels that she’s back in the Lost Woods, that the water rumble is a whisper and the rock under her boot soles is frozen moss and that she’ll meet him again someday but she doesn’t know if she’ll meet him alive, if she can hold on for long enough, if the men she handed his slack, slippery, still-warm body over to got him to the Plateau in time. She should have carried him herself but then—then _everyone_ would have died.

What a world that would have been for him to wake up to.

She sucks in a breath, smells the damp rock and the lake water and the horse’s musk that’s on her clothes, and the fog is barely even thick, is barely even sentient, and she is _fine_ , all right really, and so is he, she thinks—she never actually asked him—and if she presses her back to the mountain wall now and arches her neck around the corner, surely he will be there.

Her heels scrunch as she turns, pushes her shoulder blades against rock, hand clutched to her chest. She turns her head just so, lifts her nose to look down the length of it. The angle isn’t quite right: she sees blades of grass piercing the fog cover, rock and rubble, a glimpse of water, maybe. Nothing she cares too much about. She inches forward, maneuvering around the bend, almost breaks her silence when her hair catches on a crack in the wall. Gritting her teeth, she yanks her head to the side, sparing a displeased glance at the strands now hanging off the mountain side, threads of spun gold that would surely catch someone’s attention if they walked past—but she can’t care about that now, either.

The pass slopes ever downward until it reaches the water, and there, where the skeletal remains of Kakariko Bridge slide into view with another sideward step: his horse, and then Link himself, standing with his feet shoulder width apart, nodding his head at—she shuffles forward again—a man, talking animatedly, hands flying every which way.

She frowns. With the absence of wind and the degree of the incline, she’d be lucky to catch more than one word at a time, if even that.

Casually, Link shifts his weight from one foot to the other. The movement, though innocuous, is enough for the other man to stiffen momentarily, though he keeps up the steady patter of words that fall out of his mouth. His voice is accented, patterns repeating in intervals she could probably measure if she endeavored to do so, and as she listens for discernible words in his speech she suddenly finds that it sounds a little like a chant, a mantra, in its predictable ups and downs—or just the lilt of someone who spends all of their days and nights speaking them. She thinks of the priests and priestesses of her time, ever disapproving faces in the crowds that followed her around, stitches in her side, rows upon rows of them lining the grand staircases up to the Temple of Time on the eves of the high holidays.

But the Temple has fallen to ruin.

While the belief in the Goddesses lives on, it lingers but very subtly, and observances and guided devotions have crumbled to sporadic offerings left at the feet of moss-eaten statues, forgotten under overhangs and curtained off by roots. Even in Kakariko, in her central spot of honor, Hylia’s crude likeness sat surrounded by unlit torches, the ground before her—meant for kneeling—left unoccupied.

So then, if not Hylia’s, whose praises does he sing?

She blinks hard, refocuses on the man, on the heavy pack he carries, on the bend of his knees. The look he levels at Link—who, closed-lipped, gazes resolutely back—strikes her as that of a starving man on the hunt.

She’s had that gaze turned on her before.

She recalls the terror sweat, the rabbit beat of her heart, the world trembling on its axis that followed closely on its heels.

All of a sudden and loud enough to ring in her head, her instinct urges her to step back into the shadows, to hide and hide quickly, because she is _still_ a bad runner, _still_ without a weapon or the skill to wield one, _still_ has ankles that could twist and snap in the sands so easily, like sticks.

Instead, she takes a step forward and away from the wall.

Pebbles crunch resoundingly under her soles, and looking back, she won’t be able to say whether she knew that the ground was uneven there, whether she placed her feet like that, heels first, entirely on purpose.

She hears the quiet curse Link breathes out before the man’s head swivels much like an owl’s. His eyes track the path upwards before they land on her, and with every second he takes her in the whites around his irises grow larger. Then he grins. He says something she still cannot hear, but the curve of his mouth goes for a shape that she knows very well: _Princess_ , he says, and he says it with glee.

From the look on his face, there might have been more words yet on the tip of his tongue, though they never make it past his lips.

Link’s foot collides with his diaphragm, pulled-wire quick and hitting dead center, and the man chokes—echoing off the rock—and staggers backwards, arms pinwheeling, before catching himself in a crouch.

For a fraction of a second, they are suspended in time. The fog, disturbed, billows around their ankles as Link stares down at him, his breath rhythmic and controlled, and the man stares up in what might be disbelief, might be hatred.

She thinks it’s likely both.

No sooner does the thought appear than time skips forward into overdrive. In a flare of smoke, the man launches himself upwards, and once his feet leave the ground all his coarse clothes flutter off him to reveal the bruise-red suit beneath. There, in the air, a blue blade meets him just as he twists his thin neck around to leer at her, white ceramic mask still in his hand, like he _wants_ her to see the bloodlust twist his mouth at the sight of her, like that is more important to him than this fight and winning it, and that somehow frightens her more than anything else.

Red splatters and loses itself in the haze.

The wind picks up and brings to her a chime of steel on steel, sharp on sharp, a hitched breath—sharp on _soft_ —and then the man skids over the rough ground on his back, his teeth bared white, mask abandoned to the scuffle. Strung tight, his body snaps back upwards in the blink of an eye, but Link is right there, light on his feet, hair tousled, Sword bearing down like an extension of his arm.

She doesn’t expect Link to speak but he does, and his voice is tight with something like real anger. _Dangerous_ isn’t a word she would use to describe him, even knowing the extent of his prowess, even knowing that he brought an age-old evil to its knees, that there is no one else who could have. But, seeing the steel in his expression now, the reined-in heat with which he regards his opponent, it is the only descriptor she can think of. Low in the back of his throat, he says, “You keep your eyes on _me_.”

And she, well… she keeps her eyes on him.

There was a time when she couldn’t have, when the razor edge of a blade and the blood spray would have turned her stomach and etched themselves into her closed eyelids, and she doesn’t know when she stopped being that girl, only knows that stop, she did.

He’s _dancing_ , moved as if by some external force that knows when to deflect and when to advance earlier than it possibly could, and she doesn’t expect to be able to follow the flash of limbs and boots digging into the dirt and pressed-out breaths and forward launches, but they play out to her like a story she has heard before somewhere and never quite forgot—like she’s met his puppeteer in a dream and they told her, _it goes like this and this and this and never different_ , and what was it that Link said to her, ’ _I knew you even when I didn’t_ ’?

Something approaches. It nestles itself into the pit of embers in her chest where once lived her vigor, less of a hypothesis than perhaps an idea, brought on by his own words as they trickle back to her like clear water through sludge.

She keeps her eyes on him.

Keeps them there until the haze fades under the high-arching sun and she can tell that the ground is more red than anything else, until there is no more sharp on sharp and he stops moving, drops the Sword—drops it!—in favor of dragging both of his hands over his face, until he lets them fall to his sides and looks at her and his eyes are ancient, weary, and they beg her to _look away_.

She does. She hears him pick his Sword up from the ground. She pretends not to hear the rest.

*

She lets him usher her away from the water, back to where her horse still waits—“Early lunch?” he asked, to his feet a bunch of bruised bananas, and there was something so conflicted about him when she bent and retrieved them that she almost found it in herself to smile—and she discovers both that she prefers pumpkin over carrots and that bananas go very nicely with the sticky kind of rice favored by the Sheikah.

The air loses its damp under the direct sunlight. The rest of the day’s ride is less of a painful affair than she feared, even when he races her towards the bridge in what she suspects is an effort to distract her from the fresh marks in the dirt that drag all the way from the trampled earth to the lake shore. They stop by a sign at a fork in the road, or rather _he_ does and she stops to look back at him, and it’s like that’s all she ever does, _look back at him_ , and wonders why that is and when it stopped bothering her.

Then realizes that she never told him where they’re going, just walked up to him that morning and said “I’m leaving today, nine at the latest”, not sticking around for the reply because that’s when her bravery left her, and if he can be as reticent as he likes, so can she.

“East,” she says then, “as far as we can make it by nightfall. I hear there is someone in old Hateno who knows me yet.” And, almost more importantly, no one else who does.

He gazes past her, over the green hills and the flocks of raucous birds that have assembled there, then nods, and something in that nod tells her that he has some abstract understanding of the horror that lies just over the horizon. Someone must have told him. She wishes they hadn’t, but when he returns his eyes to her, out of all the things she doesn’t find in them, neither does she find pity.

She takes that marked absence and runs with it, as far as Cardam’s legs will take her, until the humidity reasserts itself. Though spring is well on its way into summer, it meanders in strange ways before it reaches this far beyond the Peaks, where the water hangs in the air and softens the ground, forming a heavy blanket around her that weighs down her hair and flattens out her breaths. It comes with some measure of surprise to see the swamp air treat Link much the same way, tugging his fringe over his eyes and his eyes away from her.

 _I wonder what that’s like_ , she thinks, not entirely without resentment, _to ride into ghost country when you are but a ghost yourself_.

A change, in his posture—he angles himself away as if to blend right in with the dismal weather, to get his lines to blur with the graveyard around them, his body to mingle with the lowlight.

He doesn’t succeed.

Instead, she watches him shiver, and though his shoulders are hunched, they are solid, and if she wanted to touch them now she could.

Of course she could.

She blinks moisture from her eyes, feels hot, mirthless laughter try to bubble up her throat. It’s a different kind of guilt than she expected to find out here, just a few miles short of the Fort and right in the heart of her grief.

*

“I ought to apologize,” she says that evening as she holds her hands forward into the fire’s sphere of warmth. The prolonged existence of their campfire is something of a minor miracle, and even in its glow, chills are raising the sheer hairs on her arms despite the well-made cloak she is huddled under—though that has about as much to do with the cold as with the lands that lie at her back.

Her voice is soft, pitched to fit the fire crackle and insect hum.

He hears her anyway. She thinks he might hear all the things she doesn’t say, keep them to himself behind those eyes of his, stacking up towards the moss ceiling of his mind where she can’t see them sway and topple and crash.

The dark does well to swallow up the hulking shells of the Guardians they felled together. It’s for the best she cannot see them—she doesn’t know what she would do.

When she chances a glance in his direction, she finds him with one leg stretched out, booted foot towards the fire, the other angled to support the Sword he cradles in his lap. Unsheathed, it catches most of the meager light that is around them, a wolf’s eye in the night.

He doesn’t look up. In sure motions, he wipes a fine cloth down and down the length of the blade.

She watches the movement of his hand as she speaks. Something about it grounds her. “I was so frustrated that you weren’t… weren’t him, or at any rate, not a version of him that had common ground—common _experiences_ —with me, that I allowed myself to treat you badly. Again. When I gave the order to have you placed in the shrine, I knew that this could happen, and I had prepared for it. But I didn’t think—didn’t think that any memory decay you suffered would be quite so… persistent. Permanent, even, if we look at the time that has elapsed since your awakening. It caught me off guard, and I… I _still_ …” She loses her words, clears her throat. It’s like she swallowed gravel somewhere between her first word and her last. But she has to finish this somehow, and so she continues. “I had no right. In my anger, I refused to answer your question, the one thing that you asked me, when I knew that you’ve been waiting patiently all this time.”

She’s been there before, with him at her side but with miles between them, a distance that she maintained meticulously: four steps away if he followed too closely, five if she caught his eye, twenty if he caught hers. A dance of reverse attraction, opposing poles, except that they weren’t that at all, and that was what incensed her so. If she could be compared to him, then she would come out the loser.

So here she is again, endlessly grinding her teeth against his silence—his patience, his steadfastness, his audacity to not have to grieve for her losses, the deceptive ease with which he carries his burden while she struggles, while she hurts.

It wasn’t fair then, and it isn’t fair now.

He completes the swiping movement, and she expects him to start back up at the top of the blade just below the unfurled wing.

He doesn’t. He lowers the hand, cloth balled loosely against his scarred palm.

“I didn’t ask a question, and I’m not looking for answers.” His tone could be misconstrued as curt, but she knows better; the fact that he speaks at all is proof of his goodwill. Or it _would_ have been, coming from a different man, one that she knew.

Her heart sinks, and she almost chews her lip. Curls the tips of her toes instead, like she was taught to. Even with no one left to care, she treads on the path of propriety, wears trenches into it, as it wears trenches into her. “Is it _not_ mutual, knowing another? Would it not require me knowing you in return?”

His eyelashes flutter against the apples of his cheeks; he avoids her gaze.

“Would you not want my answer to that question?” Even as she says it, she realizes that she does not _have_ a ready answer to give him. The thought of overwriting the image of who he was before all this—it’s like the fire’s warmth recedes from her at once. She draws her hands back in, stares down at the pinked flesh of her palms. The lines that run across them stand in stark relief in the flame’s moving shadow.

“I miss you.” The words just tumble out along with her next breath, and even as her cheeks and ears catch heat, still the flow does not stop. Fingers curl inward to form fists; her eyes burn. “There’s nothing left as it was. I admit I had wished just for this _one_ thing to remain.”

There’s a slow, shuddering breath.

With some difficulty, she swallows, says, “Forgive me. You don’t need to hear this. All I’ve been doing is hitting you over the head with how I feel. I worry that it might have been cruel of me.”

The rustle of damp fabric has her look up to see him rising from his perch, movements slow and careful. He plants his boots on the sodden ground, and his chest heaves upwards once before he gazes down at her, void of any and all expression. Then he turns. His footfalls sound wetly as they take him away from the fire, away from her and into the nightmare-riddled dark—her pulse thundering louder with each step.

Scrambling for something to say but coming up short, she sits and she watches, watches, until he stops. When he turns his head, the fire light paints his profile in warmth, and it might be that or it might be that there truly is no hardness there, no anger. After a short moment of hesitation, he lifts the hand that isn’t holding the Sword to motion at her, _for_ her: _come with me?_

It’s a question, not a demand.

She remains seated and he stays there, unmoving, just within the circle of light. Patient, again. It brings back to her that first morning, when she could do nothing but sit in the wet grass and he held out his hand to her, and taking it was one of the hardest things she ever did, even counting all the rest. This is much the same, somehow, except that it’s night, and they really should stay with their horses.

When she lifts herself to her feet, he breaks his eyes away from her so the light warms his back and nothing else, walks until even that fades and the hungry dark swallows him up. She sweeps her gaze over their campsite, with all of their things still in saddle bags and bundles to the foot of the fallen, more-shroom-than-wood logs they’d been sitting on, things they could very well lose to roaming boars or bokoblins or travellers with opportunistic streaks.

Out of a heavy slumber, deep down in her network or capillaries, arteries, her _heart_ , a near-primal thing raises its head and beseeches her to retrieve him—again—from the Blatchery Plain. She’s lost him to it before, and if it gets its way, she never will again. She sets her spine straight, brushes down her cloak.

In long strides, she moves to follow.

Leaves the fire and its warmth behind her, wades through several puddles nigh-invisible under the overcast, starless sky, balancing against the difference between soaked soil, knee-high grasses and the occasional stone rubble—and extended Guardian leg, loathe as she is to think about it—before she reaches him, a man-shaped pillar at the center of her vision.

“What are you doing?” she hisses.

Out of reach of the fire light, the Sword is striking. It turns his features ghostly, faint blue catching in the whites of his eyes and lining the tips of his hair, his jaw, the curve of his cheeks. As she takes in the sight, it occurs to her that the Sword may well have been the inspiration behind the ancient Sheikah’s designs all along, remembers that even thousands of years after their decline, they still strived to emulate it, to find a forgeable match to its strength—with limited success. _All_ their success, worked towards for years, was limited: hers, Link’s, the Champions’, her father’s armies’—

None of it was enough.

Neither, then, is their victory.

Not with losses that grave, that unrecoverable.

He takes a step closer to her, and the movement of their light source rips her out of her thoughts and leaves her, quite suddenly, empty.

“Setting a marker,” he says, enunciating clearly like he knows full well that she already moved on from the question she asked him. “No one else is going to.” He sighs then, quietly, and when he continues his tone is even warier than it was before. “I need you to show me where.”

For a moment, she regards him. “Where?” she asks, but she knows. “It’s _dark_ , I don’t—” But she _does_. Her shoulders slump, then resettle. By the light of the Sword, she surveys their surroundings, the shapes of Guardians and marble pillars and dead trees alike, the beacon of their campfire some distance away, the reflective glass of muddy water. She sets her sights on the place, far in the distance, in the unlit black, that hurts to skim her eyes over.

She steps around him and leads the way.


	4. Chapter 4

Water sloshes up her calf with another misstep, and it’s only after she shudders and lifts her foot up and away that the blue gleam deigns to ripple across the surface of the shallow pool, rendering it visible to her naked eye. The loudening roar of her pulse jitters down her limbs, makes her steps imprecise, her movements dizzy. A shoulder width behind her, he slows his steps. The fact that she can hear them at all means that he is being loud on purpose, likely for her benefit. She sets her jaw.

She carries on.

Spider-like, dead Guardians fade into her narrow field of vision, and every time she circles around one, she comes face to face with another. For a while, it is as though they walk beside her, themselves on a pilgrimage to the site of their undoing.

She carries on.

From somewhere outside of time, voices reach her, inside her head rather than outside, hoarse battle cries that have long since fallen on deaf ears. She lets them wash over her as she passes by congregations of rusted weapons that stick out of the peat, and if she stopped at each one and put her hands to where they pierce into the earth, if she dug deep enough and skimmed off all the water, she would find that their wielders never left this place at all.

She carries on.

She only notices the grunts and squawks blending in with the voices of the dead when he draws up next to her, pushes his shoulder against hers to steer her to the right until grass tickles again at her knees and her steps quieten. They skirt a large circle around whatever it is that she almost walked into, and once cicadas and bull frogs again let their voices sound loudest, he falls back behind her and stays there even when she finds herself splashing onward through brackish water. Guardians loom, but they allow her passage, opening up around them in a half circle of witnesses, their sightless glass eyes reflecting blue so brilliantly that for a fleeting moment, they are restored to what they once were.

She stops. An ache has settled at the base of her skull. Another squeezes at her lungs, yet another jabs at the backs of her eyes from its nest behind her brow bone. She angles her head upward to meet the phantom gaze of the machine that towers above all the others, holding court atop its throne of stone.

Between her and it, wet earth stretches, and she knows the feel of it against her bare knees like she’s ever known anything.

She points her finger and shows Link where her pain lives.

*

Mud splatters against her shins and those of the nearest Guardians. The hunk of stone sinks into the ground until only two thirds of it are left visible, and she peers down at it, then up at Link, who is wiping his hands off on his trousers and squinting at the thing as if calculating its properties of mass and weight.

She’s never known him to calculate anything, though she supposes he must have, if only to make sure that his arrows fly true.

Satisfied with his conclusions, whatever their nature, he straightens up and pulls the Sword free from its scabbard, where he returned it upon embarking on his short search for the rock. She recoils as the blue glow stabs like knives at her headache, frowns until her sight readjusts, and the dark shifts just a shade darker while he, the rock, and the dead eyes around them come back into focus in the light.

When she opens her mouth to ask him, again, what he thinks he is doing, no sounds come forth, and instead, her vision blurs. Fisting her hands at her sides, she wills the stubborn tears away, so that they might return her voice to her—the thing that she will actually need, going forward, rather than this cursed weakness.

By the time she succeeds, Link has moved again. He stands facing her, his feet apart, on the opposite side of the rock, and with both of his hands wrapped around the hilt, he is holding the Sword aloft, almost past his head. Its tip faces downward. He meets her eyes—saw her _cry_ , for the second time now, and it makes her want to sink down to the bottom of the peat where all the soldiers’ bones lie, where _his_ bones would lie, had she not sent away his failing body. But while she is sorely tempted, it will not do to acknowledge her lapse of composure before he does. So she doesn’t. She stands her ground, looks back at him and waits.

His gaze grows insistent. He extends his arms further, almost nudges the length of the Sword up against her person, her face—

“What,” she says, and _there_ it is, her voice, and how _fitting_ that it only lends itself to artless word chunks in place of sentences.

He nods his chin down at her, then up at the Sword in his grip.

Eyebrows meeting in the middle, she stares at it, at the ancient glow, the distinctive shape of it, the immaculate metal—a material she doesn’t know the name of, that was never found in any of the mines or quarries across her vast kingdom, that would have intrigued her as much as any of the shrines, any of the Divine Beasts, had she not feared it so.

It is _his_. The only reason she was ever permitted to carry it was under its own direction, and its voice left strange impressions in her memory, like she remembers the sensation of it rather than the sound itself or words at all. Like it wasn’t truly hers to listen to. Like the ears it was meant for had stopped their listening, and she had to do in a pinch.

The hours she spent with it in her grip were the very worst ones of them all.

She clears her throat. “I can’t, Link. I can’t touch it.”

He exhales heavily, the sound drawing her eye. When he speaks, she startles, shudders in the damp cold. “You can.”

Averting her gaze again, she shakes her head. She moves a step backwards, draws her cloak tighter around her frame.

Then, like a confession: “It wants you to.”

She freezes.

The thought that he could be lying slides down her spine like Malice, but she dismisses it, lets it drip off and away from her skin before it can leave its mark.

The Sword would not have chosen a liar.

And who is she to deny its wish?

Slowly, she loosens her fingers from the wool of her cloak, and they burn with the cold; in better lighting, she is sure their tips would be flushed with frigid red.

The hilt of the Sword is long, with space left to accommodate her hands above his. A glance reveals that his eyes are expectant, aglow, and the only reason why she crosses the last of the distance, strains her arms upwards and grazes her fingers against the metal is because, for reasons she cannot discern, they look _kind_.

She holds her breath, but nothing happens. It feels cool and unyielding and exactly as she would expect a sword to feel.

Deciding nothing is better than something, in this case, she goes on to fold her hands around the hilt.

Fingers curling.

Palms pressing in.

The Sword is weightless to her, his grip not releasing any of its tension, and then he shifts and it is lowered, inch by inch, until its tip touches the surface of the rock. She moves with him, the rise and fall of her chest kept carefully shallow.

Across from her and beyond the bright blade, his eyes flutter shut.

Then, with a mighty downwards jolt that almost dislodges her hands, he impales the Sword of legend in the rock. It sinks down as if through butter, or perhaps more aptly, through flesh—piercing her pain, if the rock were her breast and her heart the oozy earth beneath, and she doesn’t expect it to be a release but—somehow—

_Somehow._

Lowered, the iris pommel reaches up to the hollow of her throat. She steps closer to the blade, led forward as if by an invisible hand at her back, brings it closer to her chest.

As she bends her head towards it, she is struck by an image, then another, crowding before her eyes: her father, the King, with his stern face, his mouth hidden by his beard—smiling or unsmiling, gentle or taut; the Champions, _Urbosa_ , her booming laughter and her hand on her shoulder, lifting her up instead of weighing her down; her father in his royal regalia, gazing down at her from a painting; her maid attendants; Urbosa, again; the countless shrieking children that once made Castle Town’s streets difficult to navigate, especially in her long robes; her tutors; the librarians; the Sheikah scientists that were at the castle that day; _her father,_ whom she never bid good-bye to.

She quakes. Faces well up inside her, flooding over her, and they are countless, some known by name and some by sight only.

Not a single one of them is _him_.

A breeze bites at her wet cheeks, bringing her senses back to her. She chooses sight, opens her eyes even though they were never closed in the first place.

He’s there with her. Upright, with strength left in his arms and his shoulders and his legs, strength left to keep his head up, to cut through stone as if all it takes is will.

He’s not a face among the dead because he is not dead, because she _did_ make sure of that, no matter what he thinks.

There are others—many, many others—who she will never see again, and he is not among them, not truly. Instead, he is right there, and she can guess at the body warmth emanating from his clothes, and she can hear his breathing, and his blood has seeped into the earth below his feet but there’s more of it yet, pumping through his system, keeping his heart beating the way hers does, though perhaps not quite as quickly.

Hot tears drip down her cheeks and onto her hands, into the shallow pools at their feet.

Her grip on the Sword changes. Her fingers tighten as she holds on to it like a cane, a crutch, the one thing keeping her upright.

A warmth, out of nowhere, like that of a flame, except that it vibrates through her from where she touches the metal, like she stuck her fingers into one of Naboris’ circuits by accident. She gasps, more breath than noise. There are words being spoken onto her skin, words which she cannot hear, all movement and energy and intent, like it should hurt her but has decided not to.

Link, likewise with his head bowed, angles his chin up to look at her.

“The _voice_ ,” she exclaims, “I can’t—I can’t hear it anymore.”

She pauses, and he doesn’t look away. Not even when she slides one of her hands downwards until it touches his, her fingers slipping from the hilt and over the back of his hand. The skin there is warmed as if by fire, not clammy as it ought to be.

She can’t bring herself to move the hand away, says, “But _you_. You can, can’t you?”

He inclines his head just slightly.

“It says,” he murmurs, halting briefly as if it’s something he has to translate rather than repeat, “that it wishes it could ease your pain but that that’s not what you created it to do.”

Her expression jumps from blank to furrowed to gaping, only to fall slack when the Sword warms itself against her fingers again.

Link’s mouth quirks upwards. “It also says that it’s all right to forget.” Another pause. “That you were not made to remember.”

The irony isn’t lost on her, but it does get left by the wayside as her mind grapples with his words, turns them around and around and on their heads, compares them to texts and scripture she has memorized, old ink on paper, then gets distracted because _that’s_ what his voice keeps reminding her of: old ink on a blank page in the back of her journal where she hopes no one would look, too private even to reread, a dry-pressed flower between her thoughts.

His hand shifts underneath her touch.

“Zelda.” Oh, but she has never known him to sound so _shy_.

Jerked out of her musings, she staggers backwards, hands letting go of the Sword. Flushing furiously, she uses them to press down hard at her eyes, rub frozen tears off her raw cheeks, _avoid his gaze_.

“Goddesses,” she says, and the sound is muffled. “I… thank you. For this. It was… rather thoughtful of you.”

She peeks through the gap between her fingers, but even the little distance she has put between them has made it harder to make out his face in the gloom.

His reply is, simply, “Sure.”

With a fortifying breath, she drops her hands, folds them in front of herself. He stands in the place in which he fell, and it’s a sight that feels entirely too big for her eyes to perceive, her mind to process. “Do you know? What happened here, I mean?”

Silence, made whole by chirping, buzzing, frogs leaping out behind grass cover. The voices of the dead have settled in for sleep.

“I shall take that as a ‘no’.” Her molars bite into the soft inside of her cheek, and she stays still, unmovable as long as she can focus on something that isn’t her nerves. “Do you want to?”

He shifts, thrown off balance.

She thinks her question might have been bigger than she intended it to be.

She steps forward again until she can hold out her palms and have them turn white-blue from the proximity.

She wonders if once, long ago, the Sword had a name. If she could find it if she looked for it, deep in the rubble of the castle library, or in a tale that is still being told somewhere that is not here. She wonders if it told him its name. If the Sword remembers both of him and could draw up a scheme for her, map out the bits that overlap and those that don’t, mark the discrepancies in red the way her old tutors had, leave a note in the margins she’s seen so often: _Not the method we discussed. Requires further exploration, though result should be the same if her Highness follows through and accounts for the margin of error. Revision recommended._

Things might have been easier, had she viewed him through a scientific lens from the start.

She’s had that same thought before, a hundred years ago.

Lowering herself into a crouch, she regards the puddle the rock now resides in, the ripples and waves her movements created. She skims it with her hand, upsets the surface tension.

“I suppose it doesn’t matter,” she says. “It’s just a place. Every place has had something happen, at one point, and we can ride past because we don’t know what it was, but somewhere, someone does. That is just how it is.” Looking up, she squints to distinguish his face from the backdrop of black sky. “It is fine for you to be that person, here. And it is fine for me to be that someone, somewhere, who knows.”

She dips her hand into the water, up to the bones of her wrist. The soil at the bottom is soft and slippery, and if she pressed down hard enough, for long enough, she could grasp into its depths. Instead, she straightens up. She shakes off her hand, and the droplets become blue flames as they fly.

“It does make it easier, having a… marker.” Not a gravestone. Not. “Someone might stumble upon it and wonder. They might make a guess. Spend some time here. I think I like that.” She raises her eyebrows at him; he never removed his hands from the hilt. “Though I do think you should pull out your Sword. It’s yours as much as—well. It’s yours.”

He throws her a look—is that _amusement_?—and complies. The blade rings like a bell as it slips free from the stone, leaving behind a perfect incision point, a few inches wide and deep enough for some living thing to stretch its roots out until they reach the ground beneath. If she could return someday to fill it with a careful blend of humus and soil, mixed by her own hand, then something might bloom there not long after.

She likes that even more.

*

Most of their trek back to their campsite passes in silence but with considerably less stumbling and splashing on her part. She leaves her myriad aches behind, to pick back up whenever she might return, soil and seedling in tow, with stronger shoulders and thicker skin and ideally, a handkerchief or two.

When light trickles down from above their heads, returning color to their surroundings and dipping the rest in gentle white, she throws her head back to stare in wonder at the full moon. Pale, not bloody, it breaks through shifting clouds on its descent.

It must have moved above them, hidden, all this time.

It has been _so long_.

“Oh, look,” she whispers, and something hard and sharp in her softens, all at once, then dissolves. A fear unravelling like a knot. “It’s really over. We really did it.”

When she turns her wide eyes on him, there’s enough light for her to see by to notice a flicker of tension in his expression, a locking and then loosening jaw. There are words in his eyes, words in his mouth, words he is choosing not to say; it’s enough to throw her off kilter again.

Finally, he nods. “We did it.”

“But?”

He just shakes his head. When he smiles at her, it’s mild, the only thing about him under moonlight that is not radiant. She loathes to be patronized, and she should tell him, but his eyes are warmer than the night air, and she’d rather he not look away from her now.

*

She sleeps badly through the remainder of the dark hours, tossing in her damp quilts and knotting up her hair, but she does not dream. That alone is something of a blessing.

When glaring sunlight paints the insides of her eyelids signal red, hinting at a warm day in the swamp, she buries her face in the fabric for as long as she can bear to breathe in the must. It comes down to a handful of minutes—five, quite possibly—before she cracks her eyes open and joins him by the fire, which she is surprised to find has survived the night.

He passes her a rice ball, its surface browned to crispy sweetness on one of his portable pans, then stretches and rises from his crouch to offer up armfuls of apples to their horses. The dark circles underneath his eyes tell her he hasn’t slept, though that hasn’t stopped him from eating his share. All that’s left is pumpkin, and once she realizes, she stares at the bitten rice ball in her hand until it goes cold, which she spends the next couple of hours feeling abjectly guilty about.

Heat rolls in come late morning. It has her fold up the cuffs of her sleeves and fills her nose with the thick fumes that rise up from the warmed-up water and plant life. Darners buzz and settle on the Guardians’ motionless heads until Link snatches three in quick succession, maneuvering them into vials as survivors scatter in a flurry of wings.

She leaves him to it, watches her mane frizz up in her rippling reflection while she reviews all the flowering plants that she is sufficiently familiar with. She sorts them into groups based on habitat, hardiness, longevity and visual effect. Circles ever back to the Silent Princess, arguably the worst candidate for a successful sprout. Finds that she would rather drink from the muddy pools at her feet than strike it off any of her lists— _too emotional for a scientist_ , Purah’s voice chides her, which she ignores. She rakes her hand through her hair once, yelps at how much that twinges, and wanders back to their campsite, decision put on hold.

He waits with their horses all ready, her scant belongings packed up and secured, the fire doused with water.

Despite her lack of rest, her limbs are warm and loose when she heaves herself up into Cardam’s saddle.

*

Sweat starts clinging to her brow before she knows it, and by midday, both her, Link, and their horses are parched. They end up cutting through the plain, heading towards the bank of Squabble River as it scrapes against the towering cliffside that rises up into the ridges that border Faron, many days to the South. The river purls and cools the air; in the distance, it passes below the wall of Fort Hateno and into the unwounded country that sits beyond it.

For a moment, she allows herself to just be glad—glad that they fought off the Guardians, glad that the Fort held, that they won’t have to pass through more of the same drab battlefields upon riding through its gates. Hopes that even if she listens, no old voices will lie in wait for her there once the night comes.

She crouches to refill their water skeins and behind her, Link tends to their horses. She imagines him whispering sweet nothings to them under his breath, though she remains convinced that if he actually did, the indulgent wind would pass them on to her.

Truthfully, she is quite glad that it doesn’t.

She stoppers the skeins and sets them down by her feet, inches from the lapping water, then startles when his steps sound on the coarse sand, closer than she expected. Two low _thumps_ , and then he enters her field of vision and the river, barefoot and with his trousers rolled up to just below the knee. His skin is golden there, and as she stares, he tilts his chin up and up to look at the rocky ridges that face them, as if his thoughts, too, have turned to Faron. Or maybe Farore. She doesn’t know, with him.

She’s been studying the fishes, two different types of bass, except that one type seems to be made up entirely of juveniles and the other of adults, lending itself to the notion that they are not two types of fish at all but one, separated by age and coloring and shape but not genetics—and now that he has scared them away, it is only natural that she has to find something else to watch, and it is only natural that it would be him, since he planted himself right _there_ , where she’s been looking.

Starting from below the tip of the Sword’s scabbard, white scars trail down his left calf, three curved lines in parallels. She has no way of knowing whether they are from before or after, whether he knows how he got them, or if he knows they are there at all. She’s seen his hands, his jaw, glimpsed his back once or twice: enough to conclude that no part of him remains unmarred. She doubts he takes the time to count, let alone to catalogue.

Matter-of-factly, he says, “I do.”

She almost topples over—catches herself with her hand in the sand, then hoists herself back into her crouch with as much royal poise as she can muster, considering that the act of crouching isn’t very royal at all.

The Goddesses must be smiling upon her; he doesn’t turn around to witness her attempts to righten herself.

“You do?” she repeats once she is settled.

A welcome breeze chases over the surface of the water, cooling her warm face and rattling in the trees that have found solid-enough ground on the shoreline.

He angles his head towards the sound of her voice. His words start out strong only to quieten along the way. “You were right, yesterday. I do want to know the answer.”

She tenses, tries not to. Thinks it safest not to speak.

“When you have it,” he adds, and that, she does need the wind’s help with.

Her eyes slink off him and return to water, seeking out fish, _any_ fish, but it seems the bass know the sight of his ankles well enough in these parts, know to stay well clear of them. Resigned, her gaze returns to him, settling on the limp hand at his side—his sleeves rolled up, his leather vambraces removed to allow a rare sighting of his forearms—only to fall away again when he turns his body sideways, a stone parting the tide.

His attention weighs on her. She can feel it as acutely as her legs, aching from the ride, or her arms, itching with bug bites; though more pleasant than that, the weight has her back brace up against it.

Carefully, she lifts up her head. If she raised her eyes to his face, she thinks, and let herself meet his gaze, his confession would be met with one of her own. Or rather, it would just burst out of her, too great for her chest to hold, too eager to give itself over to him—she knows because it’s there already, a flutter where her pulse should be. She closes her fist around it the way he closed his fists around the darners, not to crush but to hold, to hold it _still_.

She rises to her feet.

“I’ll have it for you,” she says, and it’s an oath of her own. “I will.”

If her reply is a disappointment to him, he doesn’t let it show, though part of her wants him to take her by the shoulders and shake the words out of her like she has dreamed so often of doing to him, but of course he is a paragon of patience, and she—well, she used up all of hers waiting for him to join her in the fray. Now she has this. Not patience but something else, something that endures for the sake of enduring, frets for the sake of fretting. She is not entirely convinced of its usefulness.

“You truly do not want to leave?” The words wobble on her tongue in a way that would have had her father want to palm his face in despair. At least she spared him this. “The world is at your feet, and you choose to _wait_ on me.”

Silence. She finally lifts her eyes to his face, and it’s only then that he nods his head.

“Why? There’s nothing that ties you to me, now that we did what we had to. You are _free_ , Link. I’m not so sure that you understand this.”

His mouth twitches upwards.

Bewildered, she blinks, asks, “What’s so funny now?”

He takes a short, splashing step towards her, hesitates. Takes another one, fingers dragging up over his face on their way up into his hair. He pushes back his fringe. Behind him, his ponytail dances on the breeze.

By the Goddesses, someone should have taken the time to teach the boy how to _talk_ , if only to spare her the agony.

“Whatever it is, please just say it.” Her throat is tight, and if he were within touching distance, she might just go with the shaking approach. “Mind reading isn’t part of the powers granted to me.”

He wrestles with himself, if the clenching and unclenching of his jaw is of any indication. When he speaks, he averts his eyes. Lets the fringe fall back over his forehead to throw them into shadow. Haltingly, with long pauses between them, his words flow forth, but they catch all of her attention, rip shreds of it away from the fishless waters or the heat of the day to draw them back into him. “At first, I followed because it was the only thing I knew how to do. But it came back to me. Little by little, whether I worked for it or not—and I _did_ , towards the end, I did.”

He catches her muffled gasp, sends her a warning look before returning his gaze to the plains. “Not any of _that_ , no, but—something, nonetheless.”

At this, he furrows his brow, and the next time he catches her eye, it roots her to the spot. “ _You_ ,” he finally says. “Parts of you, versions of you. I knew they were you because there’s always the same… nuance. Up in the sky and in the voice you spoke to me with. It was like looking at the same tree during different seasons or seeing the clouds change color.”

A flush climbs up her neck even as her mouth falls open—to interject, to inquire, though that is as far as she gets.

Eventually, she closes it again.

“There’s always a part that stays the same, across all of it. A part that doesn’t die, or maybe it can’t; I don’t know. But it’s in you and it’s in me, too. It’s not _about_ freedom.” Any and all abashment falls off him then, and it leaves him looking sober, his eyes like open windows into a dark room, vast and unfamiliar to her. “That is all.”

She tries very hard not to splutter. She is moderately successful. “That is _all_?” 

His mouth twitches again. “All there is to it, yes.”

For a while, she stands there, her gaze locked with his and with her heart in her throat, her mouth so dry that her tongue sticks to the roof of it. She has to work to get it free. “I’m afraid that I don’t quite… follow. As much as it pains me to admit.”

The arch of his brow is genial, if unsurprised. “It’s not intellectual. It’s what’s there when you strip away the thoughts—it’s what’s _left_. That’s the only reason I know about it, I’m sure. I have nothing and so I have it.”

She _aches_ for him, then, enough for her eyes to water; if she is a remnant of a fallen kingdom, strange and foreign among the ruins, then what is he? When they set the marker, whose faces revealed themselves to him? Were there any at all? Or was there only her, across from him—and his own face in the polished blade, refracting into many?

Lifting a hand to her chest, she curls her fingers into the fabric of the tunic. “How long?”

Slowly, he blinks at her, then says, “I don’t know.” When he shrugs, the movement lacks his usual grace. “Long.”

She purses her lips. “As long as there is?”

He doesn’t nod—doesn’t shake his head either.

“All right,” she says. “And where do you go from there?”

His hand moves past his numerous girdles and belts to skim over his thigh, where she knows his trousers still hide bandages. “I… honor it. I do what I’m here to do.”

_Like this and this and this and never different._

She tilts her head and imagines him at the foot of Vah Ruta as she is being built, scaffolding all around her, her lights not yet lit. Imagines him at the side of some other princess, blonde like her and unflinching, dwarfed by the evil that rises high into the heavens only to bear down upon them. Imagines him dressed all in green, speaking a language no one has spoken since. Imagines him as he is now, sinking the Sword into stone and withdrawing it the way heat relieves storm relieves heat—naturally.

Jerkily, she nods. “And after, Hero?”

When she addressed him on the battlefield, when the air was still staticky with light and he was bloody, head to toe, she meant it as an accolade. Now, she finds that she looks at what is before her and simply calls it by its name.

He doesn’t react to it, at least not outwardly, though when his voice slips low and careful and he squints, says, “I count my blessings,” something in his gaze brightens upon her.

It is much like the way Urbosa’s used to when they met again after a long winter, as soon as the roads again became passable, or the way her long-lost mother’s did, in the one clear memory she has, when she swept her up off her nursemaid’s knee and promised to name every star for her that night, every single one, for as long as she could stay awake. It is many things, not all of them comparable, not all of them familiar, though certainly it is not the look of someone who in their heart does not know her.

And she, with neither precedent nor proof nor tests at her disposal, _believes_ him.


End file.
